Over the past few years, I’ve been a lead UX designer in an Agile environment. To clarify what I mean by this, I’ll define Agile as a specific development framework designed for rapid iterations of functional software. This is accomplished by the use of two-weeks sprints where developers will tackle a particular user story...

I found this blog from UX professional Jennifer Aldrich, a UX maven working at InVision and other places. Wherever I am, I am aware of the experience. It’s the same way I am aware of music production, film editing, writing, the way people walk and gesture, accents and a bunch of other things. This...

I ran across this article in Forbes. I know, right? Since when has a money magazine ever cared about design thinking, about promoting user experience, about rethinking the way we do things? Since somebody figured out the cruel fact that if you don’t care about this stuff, you’re dead. Sure, depending on your...

Surfing through various UX posts, I found this handy (and profane) tutorial on common UX tools. He’s pretty dismissive of the tools in an offhand way, but at least he leaves Fireworks alone. RIP Fireworks, my longtime go-to. For the record, I use paper, Fireworks, Axure, Flinto, Adobe XD and Sketch. Not in that...

I’m writing this post is response to a prompt I found on the Toptal Freelance Interactive Designers Group website. They ask me to talk in a general way about I want to bring to UX. In short, it’s one of my goals to stamp out bad UX everywhere I find. My goal is to increase...

This article borrows heavily from Clive Akass, who wrote about this in 2001. It just goes to show you that people will reject a forward-thinking idea because of things that have nothing to do with its merits. Everyone knows that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac started flogging Apple 1 circuit boards from a Palo Alto garage...

The 8 Worst UX Mistakes by Piotr Koczorowski Have you ever asked yourself what UX is all about? It’s about learning from mistakes. You can build a design around the idea of turning bad experiences into good ones. We tend to follow the core principles of UX design, but sometimes they slip designers’ minds,...

These past few months I have had the opportunity to do freelance work with a few different agencies and have had wildly different experiences. One thing that becomes clear is that, while UX is a buzzword and many clients seem to want it, many agency heads (account executives) don’t really understand what it is....

When I got my start in Web design back in the late 1990s, there were a lot of buzz words being bandied about by marketing and sales staff, words that they didn’t quite understand. This is the nature of marketing and sales, after all: promise, assure and close the deal. Unfortunately, I was always...

I recently returned from a trip to New York where I had a chance to use the subway system pretty extensively. As a UX guy, I’m always looking for good user experiences in unlikely places. The subway system was a really good lesson, because it, like many of the projects I work on, has...